Parting Words

When A Parent Travels On Business, A Child Needs Reassurance

August 26, 1990|By Barbara F. Meltz, Boston Globe.

It was a sunny day in May, a good day for flying, I thought, as my son and I played on the front steps of our house. Out of the corner of my eye, coming down the block, I could see the taxi that would take me to the airport. My heart lurched. It was 10 minutes early.

I wasn`t ready to say goodbye.

I had been planning my trip to the Soviet Union for a year. From the first, my husband and I agreed that the opportunity to accompany 20 early childhood educators on a tour of Soviet day-care centers was something I shouldn`t pass up. But from the time I made the commitment to go I agonized about the moment that now confronted me-saying goodbye to my 2 1/2-year-old son-and about the two-week separation that lay ahead for both of us.

Eli, it turned out, was well prepared for my departure, thanks to the suggestions of my aunt, Gloria Jurkowitz, a child psychologist who directs a parenting center at the Jewish Community Center in Scranton, Pa.

Her words had echoed in my head for days before my departure: ``He`s going to feel abandoned. It`s important that he knows you are going for a purpose, and that the purpose is your work.``

Her advice was to tell Eli about my trip no more than three days before I was to leave and not dwell on it. (Preschoolers can have slightly more notice, school-age children can have up to a week.) She also suggested I make a book to help Eli understand my absence.

The book-``Mama goes on a trip``-made the concept concrete for him. Full of snapshots, it begins, ``Mama is packing her suitcase. She is going on a trip for work.``

From a young child`s perspective, the critical information is on the third, fourth and fifth pages: ``While Mama is gone, everything at home will be the same.``

Make sure that their routine stays as close to normal as possible. Don`t bring in new baby sitters or unknown relatives; don`t pull your child out of day care or preschool. It may not even be a good idea for dad to take time off to care for a child while mom is away. ``The combined effect of an absent mother and a changed routine can be the worst situation,`` Field says.

School-age children, whose lives do not revolve around their parents, do better than children under 6, but the parents` attitude toward traveling affects how well a child of any age copes. ``If you are nonchalant, your child fares better. If you make a big production, your kids pick up on your anxiety,`` says Field, a professor of pediatrics, psychology and psychiatry.

Professionals refer to this as the parent`s guilt level. Stanley Turecki, a child psychiatrist, says it is the one factor that can unnecessarily mess things up.

``If the mother who travels occasionally has an adaptable 4-year-old and good child care and is consumed by guilt, it`s her problem, not her child`s,`` says Turecki, a professor at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City and author of ``The Difficult Child`` (Viking, 1989). That mother often projects her guilt onto her child and creates feelings the child doesn`t have.

Similarly, the child whose father travels frequently may be doing just fine. But the mother, lonely and sad herself, may talk too much about missing daddy, initiating a problem for a child where there wouldn`t have been one.

Guilt can get the parent who regularly commutes long distances-a flight attendant, for instance-into unnecessary trouble. It`s not uncommon for her to be lax in discipline when she first arrives home or to undermine the limits the father has set. ``These kids learn they can get away with murder, and they don`t necessarily feel good about it,`` says Field.

There are times when a parent`s guilt is appropriate, however. ``If your child is suffering, then you must take appropriate steps,`` Turecki says, including modifying your travel schedule, even switching jobs. The child to be sensitive to is one who is temperamental, has an emotional problem or a special need of some kind.

Parents will be pleased to learn that their business travel is not known to have any long-term, negative impact on a child, according to Field`s research. You can expect most children to act out during or after the first trip-perhaps by withdrawing or being more aggressive, with sleep problems or altered eating habits, or with regression in toilet training-but by the third trip, children become competent in handling the separation.

When you are gone, young children, especially toddlers, are apt to think you have abandoned them.

``Too many parents forget a child can see the world only from her vantage point. It`s not so much a question of why mommy or daddy left, but that you are gone. That`s scary to them. They think you have better things to do than be with them,`` says Andree Aelion Brooks, an educator and the author of